After playing through God of War: Ragnarök, I thought I'd play through the whole series chronologically. Since Ascension is the first part chronologically and has not been remade on the consoles, I thought I would give rpcs3 a chance and was more than surprised, that I was able to complete the whole game, as I tried the title from time to time and it crashed regularly. On the PS3, the title runs quite poorly at only 720p so my goal was 4k 60 with emulation.
I was able to play through the whole game without a single crash. With very few exceptions, the game ran at 60 fps at 3840x2160 scaled resolution. the game looks stunning at that pixel count.
Specs
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 (powertarget 70%)
AMD Ryzen 9 7950X (stock)
32 GB RAM
rpcs3 version(s)
- SYS: RPCS3 v0.0.25-14407-82a8d96f Alpha | master (and two or 3 versions before this one)
- SYS: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 16-Core Processor | 32 Threads | 31.15 GiB RAM | TSC: 4.500GHz | AVX-512+ | FMA3
- SYS: Operating system: Windows, Major: 10, Minor: 0, Build: 22621, Service Pack: none, Compatibility mode: 0
- SYS: Current Time: 2022-12- 3T15:39:41
- RSX: Found vulkan-compatible GPU: 'NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090' running on driver 526.98.0.0
- SYS: Firmware version: 4.89
Game version
God of War: Ascension™ (EU) [BCES01741] with patch 01.12
Patches
MLAA disabled because of resolution scaling
Configuration (game specific)
Straight followed the recommendations from
https://wiki.rpcs3.net/index.php?title=G..._Ascension + MultiThreaded RSX + timer wakeup delay 120μ
http://xup.in/dl,18680188 (or attached file)
Problems
#In the cutscene of chapter 15 (
https://youtu.be/fw2YiGeUDhU?t=865, not my content, captured from a ps3) kratos head and body textures flicker between completely green and normal. This behaviour does not occur again in the entire course of the game.
#The resolution scaling causes polygon edgy shimmering in certain large scale areas and in some wet areas/areas with water on surfaces, known as mesh trimming, you can fix this by using fsr and native resolution, but then, in terms of picture quality, you can also play on the ps3
.
#
Not a Problem, but worth mentioning, Audio (my own fault), the games audio option was set to stereo, the emulator one to 5.1 (as I am using a 5.1 Audio Setup), I only noticed this halfway through the game, as audio effects seemed to be missing in some places.
Performance
Most of the Time 60 fps at a resolution scale of 300%, The most demanding part of the game is the dock/ship area of chapter 15 with fps dips to mid 40 (
https://youtu.be/fw2YiGeUDhU?t=286, not my content, captured from a ps3)
Content (some of my own ingame captures (YT playlist) , my savegame and shader cache, screenshots are imho pretty sensless)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W0-Q1Wi...rBRfvAhA3q
Since I really didn't expect to be able to complete the game with rpcs3, I didn't start recording until a later part of the game. In addition, the Geforce Experience really ruined my content in parts (messed up clips with rainbow colours), as I only play with HDR activated, as old games like this particularly benefit from the HDR colour space (especially with so much gold in the game). For the recordings, I partly did without HDR, then later I used Xbox Gamebar recording, which obviously has no problems with Desktop enabled HDR but has worse quality even with 60 fps/high quality setting.
I didn't record the entire run-through, it's too time-consuming for me and it also takes forever to upload the videos. If someone provides a mesh trimming fix, I will play through the game again and upload a complete recording.